This special issue explores care practices for living with others within relationships between people, things, and deities. An increasing number of studies have focused on the concept of care across various fields. Avoiding a monolithic and romanticized view of care, research in care ethics and science and technology studies (STS) have discussed care from the perspective of ethics, politics, and practice, and highlighted the ambiguity of care, materiality, and more-than-human actors.

However, entanglements between deities and care have not been adequately discussed. This special issue argues that care is practiced through welfare, medicine, technology, and rituals to improve relationships between people, things, and deities. Furthermore, this introductory article examines the experimental process of everyday care practices, focusing on the tensions of togetherness and vulnerability. This study contributes to further discussions on care practice as a constant negotiation with heterogeneous others in everyday life.

The debate around the care for excessive alcohol users focuses on the dualism in the treatment of indigenous and non-indigenous people. This study reconsiders this debate, focusing on the canvas painting program at the Aboriginal residential rehabilitation center for alcohol problems in the Central Australian desert, to examine how alcohol-dependent Aboriginal Australians are attempting to mend damaged family relationships. Considering the hurt caused by their drinking disorder, the residents at the center depict mythological scenes on a canvas and share them with family members outside the center to restore their relationships. However, this also leads to further alcohol consumption, via the money earned by selling the canvases or due to family members sharing alcohol with previous residents. Both are forms of care practices based on the “looking after” cultural ideology. Thus, this paper illustrates the multiple layers of Aboriginal care, which, while being incompatible with the mainstream care framework, is a community-specific form of care.

Longterm care has transformed how elderly care is perceived and practiced in Japan. The shift of care provision from home to institution, from family to the market and state, and from individualized to group care has significant implications in the way elderly care is provided. With the globalization of care in Japan that is seen through the participation of migrant care workers in the care for elderly residents in care facilities, what do care relations look like? The concept of relatedness enlightens the formation of connections and ties between caregivers and care recipients in non-kin relations through statements and practices that imbue meaning to care relations. Affective care practices, such as referring to elderly residents "like a family," co-presence, and exchanging time and attention, foster relatedness between Filipino care workers and elderly residents. This study shows how relatedness produces imagined kinship and intimacy between caregivers and receivers and its potential to extend across cultures.

This paper explores how witch possession through deliverance in Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs) in Benin has changed the way people relate to spirits, and its corresponding effects. To avoid reducing the complexity of deliverance to a mere reaction to socio-economic changes related to modernity, deliverance practices are investigated from the standpoint of "togetherness with spirits". First, the significance of witch possession emerging through deliverance is examined by referencing practices of divination. Second, the identification of witches in cases of witch possession is compared with conventional witch imagery. The case studies show how witch possession in deliverance made witch-finding shift from knowledge and technique-based to a body-based practice. The consequent transformation of relations with spirits caused an expansion of the category of "witch", an empowerment of women, and instability in social relationships. Yet, social instability needs not to be understood as static "rupture" as the studies in PCCs claim. It is rather a process of "detachment" within relations of togetherness. I argue that PCCs in Africa should not only be analyzed from the perspective of Christianity, but also from the one of larger spirits-human ecologies, wherein detachment co-exist as a kind of relation of togetherness.

This study explores care practices associated with the circulation of blessing pills called "Jinden," which are connected to deities and monastic politics in Tawang, Northeast India. While many studies on Tibetan medicine or Sowa Rigpa discuss institutionalized Tibetan pills in the global market and the interface between medicine and religion, they have not adequately examined the blessing pills administered in monasteries and their relationship with care experiences. Referring to the perspective of power objects in Tibetan Buddhism, this study argues that lay people act as active patients who negotiate with other people, deities, and spirits through Jinden. The historical process of Jinden circulation and its interaction with care and monastic politics are also discussed to highlight how care practices reconfigure hierarchies in monasteries. This article extends the existing knowledge on care practices and further explores the relationship between medicine, religion, and bodies in studies of care and Sowa Rigpa.